by Judith Tarr
The shift took Danu somewhat aback. But his wits were quick enough, and the answer was on his tongue before the pause could stretch too long. “Our men aren’t kept as your women are. None of us knows such confinement.”
“A wise man wouldn’t tell me such a thing,” Agni said. “I might use it against you.”
“You won’t,” Danu said.
Those strange eyes, the color of amber under the ruddy brows, flashed on him in something that was not quite anger. “How do you know? What makes you trust me?”
Danu did not know how to answer that. “What makes you trust no one?” he demanded in return.
An odd expression crossed Agni’s face, half sad, half wry. “Our worlds are so different,” he said. And abruptly: “Ride with me.”
Danu did not want to ride with a man who had ridden since he was old enough to sit up, and who had no cause to be kind to a fledgling horseman. But there was no graceful way to refuse—and no way, either, to quell the uprush of pride that made him answer before he thought, “Yes. Yes, I’ll ride with you.”
After they had caught and readied their horses, and fended off horsemen who came to ask this or that of their king, and disposed of one or two who seemed determined to guard Agni against a dangerous stranger, they rode out westward. Danu had no particular aim in mind; simply to ride, because Sarama had told him to do that, and do it every day, till it was as natural to him as walking.
It was still a beastly uncomfortable way to get about; but Danu had admitted long since that it was faster than going afoot. He was, maybe, growing a little less awkward. He did not need to cling quite so tightly with knees and hands. He was learning, a little, to follow the movement beneath him, to loosen his hips and back and let the horse do the rest.
Agni’s ease and comfort stung him with envy. He never tensed or lost his balance. He rode as if he were a part of his horse, smooth and effortless, riding out an eruption at some trifle or other, and never so much as shifting on his stallion’s back. Danu knew too well how difficult that was.
Agni said nothing of Danu’s lack of skill, nor, to be fair, implied it, either. He accepted it, as far as Danu could see, without either approval or disapproval. It simply was.
In that he was like his sister. But then, as Tilia had said, they were very much alike.
It did not make Danu like him any better.
They spoke little as they rode, and then of lesser things: the flight of a bird, the warmth of the air, the buzzing of bees in a flowery field. Danu marked those and where they flew, for later; to raid their nest and capture their honey.
He knew a stab of startlement at that, a flash of guilt. He was thinking like a horseman again. Thinking of fighting and taking.
And yet that was what one did with honey. One took it. One left a little for the bees, but the rest was lawful booty.
Just so must the horsemen think of the Lady’s country. Its riches were there to be won. They did not ask if they had a right to win any such thing. They simply did it.
He looked at the king of the horsemen with eyes that saw a little differently; that maybe understood him. It was not a comfortable understanding. Danu could not even flee from it. He had changed too much. He was not the placid and all too complacent creature who had been so shocked by dreams of fire, nor yet the complaisant one who had followed Catin to Larchwood and there come face to face with the Mare’s servant.
It seemed that Agni wanted simply to ride, to go as far as he could, though certainly not as fast as he could, not with Danu dragging at his tail. Nevertheless he set a pace that left Danu breathless, clinging for his life to his horse’s mane, and his horse straining to match the effortless long stride of Agni’s stallion. It was terrifying, and yet it was wonderful: the surge and thrust of great muscles beneath him, the strong scent of sweat, the wind singing in his ears, whipping his heavy braid straight out behind him.
They stopped at last for nothing that Danu did. His horse had no more speed left in him, and Agni’s seemed minded to pause beside an eddy of the river for a nibble of summer-ripened grass. Danu sat on the sweat-soaked back and simply breathed.
The horseman looked as if he had been out for a canter on a summer’s morning, a little windblown but much at ease otherwise. Danu wondered if that was hate he felt, or simply envy. Envy, he hoped. Hate was a thing of men who fought in wars. Not of the Lady’s sons and daughters.
Envy, then. He could envy that ease and that air of perfect calm, so like a Mother’s and yet so different. It must come with the office, with speaking for the Lady, or for one’s gods, before the people.
Agni said, “You don’t ride badly.”
“I ride terribly,” Danu said.
Agni laughed, sharp and short and a little surprised. “No, not terribly at all, for one who came to it so late.”
“Your sister is a good teacher.”
Danu waited for the amber eyes to darken, for the brows to knit; but something, maybe wind and sunlight, had muted Agni’s usual resentment at Danu’s daring to speak of Sarama. Agni was almost amiable as he said, “She’s a better rider than I am. Always has been.”
“And you will admit it?”
Agni seemed as surprised as Sarama was, to be asked such a thing. These horsemen did not say what they thought, when they thought it. Danu had a great deal of difficulty understanding that, but it was so.
As with Sarama, Agni was startled into an honest response. “I don’t have any pride to protect, with you.”
“Because I have none?”
Agni drew breath as if to deny it, but said instead, “You aren’t as our people are.”
“No,” Danu said.
“She likes that in you.”
“I think it puzzles her.”
“Women like to be mystified,” Agni said.
“She doesn’t like it at all,” Danu said. “It makes her angry. Then she snarls at me. And after she’s done snarling . . .”
He could have said the rest to the brother of a woman from this country. But not to this one. Even the suggestion made Agni’s eyes darken.
“Yes,” Danu said before Agni could speak. “You could kill me or worse. But that’s in your country. This is mine. And in mine, women are free of themselves, and no man would dare to tell them how to behave.”
That made Agni frown, but it was a different kind of frown, directed not at Danu but at something outside of them both. Danu let the silence grow, till Agni broke it. “This is not your country now. It is mine.”
Danu was too polite to shake his head or to contradict Agni directly. He said, “The Lady is strong, and the Mothers partake of her strength.”
“They gave in to me,” Agni said.
“They bent like wheat before the wind,” said Danu. “When the wind passes, the wheat grows straight again.”
“This wind won’t pass,” Agni said.
“It might grow gentler.”
“Don’t hope too much,” said Agni, roughly enough to raise Danu’s brows.
“You don’t like it when people think you gentle,” Danu said. “You’re afraid it means you’re soft.”
“My people would say that,” Agni said.
“Your people see the world strangely.” Danu slid from his horse’s back and stretched, groaning a little. He did not know that he could or would mount again. If he could not, then by the Lady he would walk, and Agni could go or stay as he pleased.
Agni chose to slide down as well, far more gracefully and without the sounds of pain. He was a great deal taller than Danu, but rather less broad. Danu refused to be made small beside him.
He noticed. His expression altered slightly.
Maybe he was amused. Maybe not. “So,” he said. “You have a little pride after all.”
“You’re a man,” Danu said.
“And are you?”
“My body says I am.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“What?” asked Danu. “Killing people? We don’t do that here.”
&n
bsp; “You didn’t do it. That will change.”
“Not if we can help it.”
“You won’t be able to,” Agni said.
“You want that to be true.”
Agni’s eyes went a little wild. “Here. Wrestle with me.”
Danu was tired and his bones ached, and his tender parts chafed abominably. He was in no mood to play a game, least of all with this man.
And yet, as Agni had observed, he had a glimmer of pride. Of all the things that fighting was, this, the matching of body and body, was least displeasing to the Lady. She judged strength by it, and judged a man’s wits, too.
Some among her people were not ill versed in it—Kosti-the-Bull not the least of them. And Danu, though he made no vaunt of it. Maybe Sarama did not even know. She had never asked.
There were, when he paused to think, a number of such things that he had kept to himself. And Agni was waiting, his lip starting to curl, sure that the soft foreigner was going to turn tail and run.
Danu let himself go still. His feet were solid on the summer-parched earth. He felt the pulse of it in his blood, the beating of the Lady’s own heart. He drew in a breath of warm sweet air overlaid with a pungency that was the horseman, a mingled scent of man and leather and horses.
Thought emptied out of him; doubt, fear, fretting over things that might never be. When he was pure being and pure will, he leaped.
The horseman reeled backward, overborne by Danu’s weight. He crashed bruisingly to the ground, taken all off guard, but even yet beginning to fight back.
He was quick and he was strong, but Danu had expected both. Danu sat on Agni’s chest until the horseman stopped trying to twist free, and said mildly, “Whatever you wanted this to settle, I hope this settles it.”
Agni regarded him in pure astonishment. No anger, Danu was interested to see. Another of the horsemen would have been angry—enough maybe to kill.
“So that’s what you do,” Agni said. “Your body’s your weapon.”
“We do it for pleasure,” Danu said, “and because it’s better than galloping about killing people.”
Agni accorded him an ironic salute, somewhat hampered by Danu’s weight on his chest. “Ah! Well struck. Now will you try another round? Fighting fair this time?”
“What is fair?” Danu asked. But he let Agni up and gave him time to compose himself.
Agni put aside his belt and his baldric and the weapons that he carried as if he might be killed at any moment, and stripped off tunic and shirt, and fussed unduly in Danu’s opinion. When at great length he showed himself ready, Danu fell on him again and flattened him again.
“You have no skill at all,” Danu said.
“You never let me show it,” Agni snapped, not too feebly for a man who had had the breath knocked out of him twice running.
“Ah,” said Danu. “You want to play, not win. Well then. Up. Give me a game worth playing.”
He could do that, after all, and with the strength of temper, too. But Danu was quicker and stronger, and flattened him a third time.
This time Danu was breathing lightly, and the wind cooled the sweat on his cheeks and brow. Agni was running with it, his bare breast and arms gleaming. He wriggled like a fish in Danu’s grip, and nearly as slippery as one, too.
Danu picked Agni up, not as effortlessly as he might have liked Agni to think, and heaved him into the river.
Agni came up roaring. Danu laughed at him, and only laughed the harder when Agni seized him and tripped him and pitched him into the water. He had to throttle his laughter before he choked on it; but when he had thrashed and flailed his way to air again, he let it out in a full-throated peal.
“You are mad,” Agni said. He was standing waist-deep in the river, well and prudently out of Danu’s reach.
Danu grinned at him. “I was hating you,” he said by way of explanation, “for being so at ease on a horse.”
“So you can best me thrice out of three,” Agni said. “I still don’t like you.”
Ah, Danu thought: at last, honesty. “Nor I you,” he said.
“We’ll never be friends,” said Agni.
“No,” said Danu.
“But something else,” Agni said. “That, we seem to have fallen into. Almost—brothers.”
Danu considered that. He liked it no more than he liked Agni. And yet it had a degree of truth in it. Enough maybe to go on with.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. After a fashion, brothers.”
73
Agni did not know what Danu had done, if anything, to soften Tilia’s resistance; but it was so. When he came back from that odd and humiliating skirmish, he found her sitting serenely in the room he slept in. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her eyes were cast down, as demure as any woman of the tribes should undertake to be.
She was not alone. The boy Mika was with her, all eyes and raw nerves. Agni had meant to wait her out; but Mika was as spooky as a whipped colt.
“What did you do to Mika?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” she said. She seemed unperturbed by the abruptness of the attack—not at all like Agni in the wake of Danu’s onslaught.
Mika nodded vehemently. “She didn’t do a thing. She—she just—”
“I asked him to speak for me if I stumble,” she said, barely stumbling at all.
“He looks as if you beat him,” Agni said—not wisely, and he knew it.
Her lips tightened a fraction, but her calm did not break. “I’m a Mother’s heir,” she said. “He’s a boychild. And he knows it too well.”
Mika dipped his head, but not before he had nodded again, nearly thumping his meager chest with his chin. He mumbled something: apology, Agni thought.
“Never apologize to a woman,” Agni said to him. “It only diminishes you.”
She could not have understood all of that, but she understood enough.
“You think you can win me?” she said. “Is that what you do? Win a woman? You’re not doing it well at all.”
“So what do you do?” he demanded. “Do you try to win a man? Or do you just point to him and say, ‘You. Now. Come’?”
She laughed. It was pure mirth, untainted with anger or perceptible dislike. It made him think of Danu rising up out of the river, white teeth gleaming, laughing as if there were nothing in the world more hilarious than being pitched into an icy river.
All these people were mad, Agni decided. Since madness was sacred, and since a wise man never stood in the way of true insanity, he waited till Tilia was done with her high amusement at his expense. Then he waited longer, until she recovered such wits as she had.
“Mika,” she said, “say it.”
Mika blanched and stammered, but he mastered himself before Agni could move to do it for him. He spoke haltingly at first, but thereafter with growing confidence, as the words he had been taught rolled out of him.
“She—she wants me to speak for her, because she’s a fair novice in this language you speak, but I’ve been at it longer. And I’m younger, you know. And the Lady has given me the gift. So she asks—she tells me to say to you: Man of the horsemen, what you ask is presumptuous beyond bearing, and I should laugh in your face. But the Lady speaks to me, and she tells me that the winds of the world are changing. That a storm is coming down on us, and you are but the wind that blows before it. But wind can be strong in itself, stronger than the lightning or the rain. A blast of it can topple a forest, or lift up a river and cast it on dry land.
“I have no desire to be poured out like water, or left in a bed of mud and gasping fishes. I’ll ride with you on the storm, horseman. I’ll make the Great Marriage with you as you ask me to do.
“Now I ask you,” Mika said, and Agni heard Tilia clear behind the words, even as he saw her face as she listened, with its wide dark eyes and its firm chin. “Do you know what this is that you ask? Do you understand what the rite is, and what it will do to us both?”
He was to answer that. He did, slowly, because it se
emed to matter a great deal to her. “We have marriage among my people.”
“Great Marriage,” Tilia said, speaking for herself, thus granting Mika a reprieve. “What you speak of—a man takes a woman, the woman obeys the man, she bears his children, she keeps his tent—that’s what a man does when a woman asks him to be the keeper of her house. That’s not the Great Marriage.” She inclined her head toward Mika.
He spoke hastily, babbling the first few words, but again he calmed as he went on. He was a brave child, was Mika, and gods-gifted. “The Great Marriage is the Lady’s strongest rite. It partakes of everything that she is, and everything that she wishes for her people. It makes a woman and a man one. It sets them in the center of the circle, and the circle encompasses them, and they give the circle its power. Once that rite is done, there is no sundering the two so joined. There is no walking away, horseman. No changing it once it’s done. The vows you take in that rite, you take for as long as your soul shall live.” He paused. Tilia nodded again, bidding him go on. “Will you do this, then? Will you even go so far?”
“Will you?” Agni asked her directly.
“It may be the saving of this city,” she said.
“That’s all?” Agni did not like to admit it, but the stab in his belly was not anger. It was disappointment. “If I were elderly and ugly and walked with a limp, would it be the same to you?”
“You are not those things,” she said.
“Does it matter that I’m not?”
“Of course it matters,” she said.
“So,” Agni said. “You want me, a little.”
“Any woman would,” she said with the breathtaking bluntness that seemed to mark all her people. She rose, and without farewell or further word, left the room.
It seemed empty without her in it. Mika had sunk back against the wall. His breath was coming a little quickly; his face was greenish pale.
“There now,” Agni said as to a skittish colt. “There. She’s gone. And I won’t eat you.”
“You’re sure?”
Agni sighed gustily. “I don’t think I’m hungry. I don’t know if I dare to be hungry.”
“Yes,” Mika said in all seriousness. “She’s a Mother’s heir, you see. That’s what Mothers and Mothers’ heirs do.”